


Shades

by endofunctor



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-12
Updated: 2011-11-12
Packaged: 2017-10-25 23:43:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/276149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endofunctor/pseuds/endofunctor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave and Terezi are so alike that sometimes it seems that they won't fit together. But just because opposites attract doesn't mean that everything that attracts must be opposite.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shades

He sees from behind shades, and she sees through them. So when the two of them meet, there are fireworks, explosions, tongues and teal and crimson. There is sharpness pressed against pink and hands that don’t know what they’re doing, never have known, but find their way based on a dozen movies secretly watched in the dead of night with the sound all the way off. (Because his bro would hear, he knows he would, and if he were seen it’d be a wound that would never stop bleeding).

Of course, the honeymoon doesn’t last forever. The ecstasy of meeting, of beginnings, eventually yields to the deafening quiet of mere coexistence. But it’s worse for them, because Dave doesn’t know how to fight without _fighting_ , and neither does Terezi. A lifetime of being raised in the forest by a dragon egg that spoke to her in dreams, of studying old history books and visiting the hallowed halls of the great legislacerators who argued as much with their blades as their wit doesn’t prepare her for a wound that goes straight to the heart. A life of hash rap battles and swords in the fridge and CPS on speed dial and vaguely obscene puppets everywhere Bro could get away with hiding them do nothing to teach Dave how to wield his words. So claws rake across skin and blades nick gray and expose teal. And then they don’t speak to each other for three days, nights, whatever passes for time on an asteroid tumbling around an impossibly-colored sun.

But like a slowly-dying star trapped in an orbit around a black hole, they find themselves drawn back to each other, and with another gamma-ray burst of affectionate accretion they make out. But they don't make up, and you don’t have to be a player of space to know the difference. They both know that one of these days it’ll come back to bite him harder than she ever could, that everything might break like a shitty katana left out in the metal-warping heat for too long, but it’s good enough for now.

Until it isn’t. Until one day the stress and fatigue cracks through the imitation carbon steel of his sword, through the plastic of his shades, and they _snap_. They’re both bleeding and he has no intention of cleaning up the crimson rivers on his peach-pale skin, but that’s nothing new for either of them. The worst part is that she doesn’t care, that she’s gone further out into apoapsis in their binary orbital dance than ever before and the sight of red inches running down Dave’s skin does absolutely nothing for her. So she just leaves, turns around and makes her way back to her private respiteblock.

But she can’t stop seeing his particular shade everywhere, because you can’t block out scents and tastes, she can’t close her nose and mouth forever or she’ll stop breathing just as if she were swinging from a rope. And everywhere she turns she sees red, his red, her red, and she doesn’t have anything to remove it with but her tongue. The cherry tastes like ash. She’s no longer constantly surrounded by an aura of H3H3H3, her grin doesn’t extend off her face and into the space behind her ears, and even the brightest colors smell muted and far away.

It’s worse for him, because he’s gotten used to life with Terezi Pyrope’s running commentary on every single bit of the asteroid they’ve gotten half-used to living in, used to the feeling of a warm tongue up the side of his cheek whenever she feels affectionate or the repeated press of soft felt between his shoulderblades when Terezi decides that Pyralspite wants Dave to G3T UP L4ZYBON3S >:[. He tries freestyling, spitting words into the uncaring void and hoping they don’t echo back at him. It all comes out wrong, he’s skipping and stumbling like a scratched record, and the echoes are bouncing off the far walls of the lab and coming back to him, syncopating his rhythm and snapping his syllables in half. All the high harmonics are echoing around in his head because they remind him of her.

He’s lost without her, and not just in the sense that he can’t find his way around this damn place but in that without Terezi there’s nothing for him to do. She’s his personal disaster, the illest of stars in his personal night sky, and without the colored chalk trails that seem to draw themselves on walls wherever he walks it’s a hell of a lot more gray in the Veil. And, when it all comes down to it, that’s why he likes her so much. Because it doesn’t matter if she’s collaborating him on a SBaHJ that reaches tiers of irony he could only dream of, or if she’s annoying the ever-loving shit out of him by doofing him with the iniquitous Viceroy Cherryscale, who simply must be brought to justice. He can handle her at her best, and he can handle her at her worst. The one thing that he simply can’t deal with is no Terezi at all.

So he comes back to her. Not because John or Jade or Rose or Karkat or anybody told him that he really should and he managed to convince himself that he was only doing it because they told him to. This time, he comes back to her because he convinced _himself_ it was the best thing to do. He comes back and before she can get a scratchy word in he tells her the things that he doesn’t like about her. Not the things that he secretly likes, like the way she licks his jugular, but the things he honestly doesn’t like, like the way she’s always bringing up his bro and John, making him feel inadequate even for his ascension.

And then she starts back at him, telling him how absolutely infuriating it is that he never lets his guard down, never takes his knightly armor off to to just be Dave. The words go back and forth in es and 3s and they’re getting closer and the corners of her mouth are sliding back towards her ears, and Dave Strider actually fucking smiles, because drop the irony drop the meta-recursion, he really does love her, and she really does pity him.

So of course they kiss again, but it’s not a kiss with biting like normal but an actual honest to god _kiss_ like she saw in those awful movies she’d watch with Karkat and constantly tease him about (only that’s the last thing on her mind right now as her arms go around his waist, and, yes, her right foot pops up just a little bit because the foot lift during a kiss is a transuniversal constant.)

And she leans forward, gives the bridge of his nose a long, slow lick that threatens to lift his shades off of his face, and does her best romantic movie impression.

GC: D4V3   
GC: 1LL N3V3R L3T GO   
TG: close enough   
TG: now come on i think rose is making a new dress   
TG: i know you love giving her fashion advice   
GC: TH3 ROS3 HUM4N 4LW4YS M4K3S TH3 MOST D3L1C1OUS CLOTH3S   
GC: L3TS GO L1CK 1T >:D

Five minutes later, Rose’s new dress is covered in saliva, both human and troll. Kanaya gives them both a lecture, of course. But both of them agree: it was so worth it.


End file.
